Law Commons^™

Integrative Environmental Law: A Prescription For Law In The Time Of Climate Change, Alyson C. Flournoy

UF Law Faculty Publications

As the magnitude of the threat posed by climate change has become increasingly apparent, scholars and practitioners have begun a dialogue about how to reform environmental law to meet the challenge. Concepts like adaptive management, sustainability, and resilience have emerged in succession, as policy makers and scholars search for new moorings for our ethical and legal framework. While useful, these concepts have failed to provide a vision, goal, or solid ethical grounding for environmental law in the era of climate change. This project takes a new approach by exploring what we can learn from the field of Integrative Medicine. The …

The Next Generation Of Trade And Environment Conflicts: The Rise Of Green Industrial Policy, Mark Wu, James Salzman

Faculty Scholarship

A major shift is transforming the trade and environment field, triggered by governments’ rising use of industrial policies to spark nascent renewable energy industries and to restrict exports of certain minerals in the face of political economy constraints. While economically distorting, these policies do produce significant economic and environmental benefits. At the same time, they often violate World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, leading to increasingly harsh conflicts between trading partners.

This Article presents a comprehensive analysis of these emerging conflicts, arguing that they represent a sharp break from past trade and environment disputes. It examines the causes of the shift …

The Political Economy Of Climate Change Winners, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Many people and businesses in the United States stand to receive market and nonmarket benefits from climate change as it moves forward over the next 100 years. Speaking of climate change benefits is not for polite 'green' conversation, but ignoring them as climate policy dialogue and legal scholarship consistently have" will not make them go away. It is important to take climate change benefits into account if they lead people and businesses to believe that climate change will not be so bad for them, or even to believe it has made them into climate change winners. Thus, whereas legal scholars …

American Natures: The Shape Of Conflict In Environmental Law, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

There is a firestorm of political and cultural conflict around environmental issues,including but running well beyond climate change. Legal scholarship is in a bad position to make sense of this conflict because the field has concentrated on making sound policy recommendations to an idealized lawmaker, neglecting the deeply held and sharply clashing values that drive, or block, environmental lawmaking. This Article sets out a framework for understanding and engaging the clash of values in environmental law and, by extension,approaching the field more generally. Americans have held, and legislated based upon, four distinct ideas about why the natural world matters and …

Overcoming The Impasse On Intellectual Property And Climate Change At The Unfccc: A Way Forward, Jerome H. Reichman, Ahmed Abdel Latif, Keith Maskus, Ruth Okediji, Pedro Roffe

Faculty Scholarship

The global spotlight is once again focused on the challenges of climate change with the annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties kicking off this week (November 28th–December 7th) in Durban, South Africa. With the international community looking to Durban for results, an important opportunity exists to address one of the most contentious – and misunderstood – issues in the climate change debate: the role of intellectual property rights in the production of and access to mitigation and adaptation technologies. The rapid development and diffusion of these technologies is a key component of the …

Pursuing Geoengineering For Atmospheric Restoration, James Salzman, Robert B. Jackson

Faculty Scholarship

Geoengineering is fraught with problems, but research on three approaches could lead to the greatest climate benefits with the smallest chance of unintentional environmental harm. The authors propose a model for thinking about geoengineering based on the concept of restoration, suggesting the term “atmospheric restoration.” Under this model geoengineering efforts are prioritized based on three principles: to treat the cause of the disease itself, to reduce the chance of harm, and to prioritize activities with the greatest chance of public acceptance.

Based on these principles, the authors propose three forms of geoengineering that could provide the greatest climate benefits with …

Stepping Stone Or Stumbling Block: Incrementalism And National Climate Change Legislation, Rachel Brewster

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the effects of incremental domestic legislation on international negotiations to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Mitigating the effects of climate change is a global public good, which, ultimately, only an international agreement can provide. The common presumption (justified or not) is that national legislation is a step forward to an international agreement. This Article analyzes how national legislation can create a demand for international action but can also preempt or frustrate international efforts. The crucial issue, which has been largely ignored thus far, is how incremental steps at the domestic level alter international negotiations. This paper identifies four …

The Politics Of Nature: Climate Change, Environmental Law, And Democracy, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars’ discussions of climate change assume that the issue is one mainly of engineering incentives, and that “environmental values” are too weak, vague, or both to spur political action to address the emerging crisis. This Article gives reason to believe otherwise. The major natural resource and environmental statutes, from the acts creating national forests and parks to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, have emerged from precisely the activity that discussions of climate change neglect: democratic argument over the value of the natural world and its role in competing ideas of citizenship, national purpose, and the role and …

Slides: Climate Change And The Death Of Stationarity: A New Era For Western Water?, Stephen T. Gray

Western Water Law, Policy and Management: Ripples, Currents, and New Channels for Inquiry (Martz Summer Conference, June 3-5)

Presenter: Steven T. Gray, Wyoming State Climatologist, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY

48 slides

Global Warming And The Problem Of Policy Innovation: Lessons From The Early Environmental Movement, Christopher H. Schroeder

Faculty Scholarship

When it comes to influencing government decisions, special interests have some built-in advantages over the general public interest. When the individual members of special interest groups have a good deal to gain or lose as a result of government action, special interests can organize more effectively, and generate benefits for elected officials, such as campaign contributions and other forms of political support. They will seek to use those advantages to influence government decisions favorable to them. The public choice theory of government decision making sometimes comes close to elevating this point into a universal law, suggesting that the general public …

Corn Futures: Consumer Politics, Health, And Climate Change, Jedediah Purdy, James Salzman

Faculty Scholarship

The Mexicans have long been known as the Corn People, but that label perhaps provides a better fit for modern day Americans. The simple seeds of corn play a fundamental role unprecedented in the history of human agriculture. Corn now underpins two major sectors, arguably the two most important sectors, of our modern economy - food supply and energy supply. How we choose to consume this seed has far-ranging consequences for pressing issues as far apart as climate change and diabetes, energy policy and immigration, tropical deforestation and food riots.

California Climate Change And The Constitution, Christopher H. Schroeder, Neil S. Siegel, Erwin Chemerinsky, Brigham Daniels, Brettny Hardy, Tim Profeta

Faculty Scholarship

While the United States has of yet not passed meaningful legislation that addresses climate change, several U.S. states are taking steps to reduce the carbon footprints of their industries and citizens. As it has in the past, California is leading the way. But are its actions legal?

Allocating Responsibility For The Failure Of Global Warming Policies, W. Kip Viscusi, Joni Hersch

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A recent series of climate change lawsuits has sought to mimic the "regulation through litigation" approach of the claims brought by the states against cigarette manufacturers. What is distinctive about the cigarette cases relative to conventional tort claims is that they were not brought on behalf of individual smokers, but rather sought to recoup the Medicaid-related costs of smoking. A parallel climate change litigation approach seeks payments from public utilities, energy producers, and other parties responsible for greenhouse gas emissions to reflect the long-term societal damages that the plaintiffs claim will be caused by this pollution. While environmental litigation of …

Allocating Responsibility For The Failure Of Global Warming Policies, Joni Hersch, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A recent series of climate change lawsuits has sought to mimic the "regulation through litigation" approach of the claims brought by the states against cigarette manufacturers. What is distinctive about the cigarette cases relative to conventional tort claims is that they were not brought on behalf of individual smokers, but rather sought to recoup the Medicaid-related costs of smoking. A parallel climate change litigation approach seeks payments from public utilities, energy producers, and other parties responsible for greenhouse gas emissions to reflect the long-term societal damages that the plaintiffs claim will be caused by this pollution. While environmental litigation of …

Corrective Justice And Liability For Global Warming, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reconstructing Climate Policy: Beyond Kyoto, Jonathan B. Wiener, Richard B. Stewart

Faculty Scholarship

In their comprehensive analysis of the Kyoto Protocol and climate policy, Richard B. Stewart and Jonathan B. Wiener examine the current impasse in climate policy and the potential steps nations can take to reduce greenhouse gases. They summarize the current state of information regarding the extent of global warming that would be caused by increasing uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions. They explain why participation by all major greenhouse gas-emitting countries is essential to curb future greenhouse gas emissions and also note the significant obstacles to obtaining such participation.

Stewart and Wiener argue it is in the national interest of the United …